David Cameron's statement about the Hillsborough disaster was big news on Twitter

I would have thought counting tweets mentioning him has more to do with his political personality than his role as Prime Minister

Labour MP Paul Flynn

An email from one of his taxpayer-funded advisers also shows them cooing about the popularity of a Number 10 tweet about the 1989 football disaster.

The communication, marked ­“internal stuff so not for wide ­distribution”, shows a Cabinet ­Office worker saying: “One hour ­after being (sent) the tweet has been retweeted over 1,000 times. The third most retweeted No10 tweet since 2008.”

He goes on to say: “Mentions of phrases and hashtags associated to Hillsborough peaked during the PM’s statement at over 2,000 ­mentions a minute and 100,000 over the last two hours.”

The Number 10 tweet, which read: “PM: I am profoundly sorry for the injustice that the families have ­suffered over the past 23 years #Hillsborough” had been retweeted 1,000 times at the time the email was sent.

The analysis was sent by the ­Cabinet Office official to the ­Association of Chief Police ­ Officers less than two hours after Cameron’s September 12 speech.

Labour MP Paul Flynn said the use of civil servants in monitoring a politician’s impact on Twitter was “questionable”.

He said: “I would have thought counting tweets mentioning him has more to do with his political personality than his role as Prime Minister.

“The question is how much of this – if it is meant to promote him as a politician – should be funded from the public purse?”

The speech – following the ­damning independent report on the cover-up over Hillsborough – was widely praised.

Tory leader Cameron, 46, said the evidence presented by the ­Hillsborough Independent Panel, which had trawled through 450,000 official documents, revealed there had been a “double injustice” – the disaster itself and Liverpool fans being wrongly blamed for it.

Margaret Aspinall – chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group – said the speech was an ­important moment in the fight for justice over tragedy.

Margaret’s son James, 18, was one of 96 people who lost their lives ­following the crush at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in Sheffield.

She said: “The apology he made was a very positive thing for the country.

“What the checking of retweets says to me is that they wanted to see what people thought of it, they wanted to see the reaction.”